Basso ContinuoThe Past as Accompaniment

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Historians, grammarians, archivists, invariably come late to a given civilisation. Their approach is marked, already, by a spirit of retrospection: one in which the dynamic of that given civilisation has begun giving way to doubt, and doubt – ineluctably – to nostalgia. They face backwards and attempt to collect, as they do, the fading evidence of a past that – by its very evanescence – calls out for inquiry, and inquiry, in turn, for documentation. Doesn’t this spirit of retrospection apply to ourselves as well? At the very gates of a new millennium, on the threshold of a so-called new age, haven’t we, too, as a people, begun turning backward, growing in our innermost moments increasingly reminiscent? Victims of a ‘regressive evolution’ in which the immense advances of technology have all but depleted the fertile landscapes of the imaginary – that vast terrain in which we once erected the statuary of our collective referents, establishing thereby the determinants by which we might recognise ourselves – we, too, have begun gazing backwards. Tracing, resuscitating, preserving whatever we can of those lost worlds, we’ve taken to collecting artefact, restoring all but forgotten public monuments, recording each and every available detail (no matter how minor) touching upon each and every vestigial scrap (no matter how slight) that we’ve managed to uncover. We’ve grown greedy – it would seem – for the obliterated.

This movement was long in coming. If the Renaissance and its convulsive aftermath, the Baroque, were far too engaged in the unravelling of their own hallucinatory fabric to look backwards, their demise in the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century gave rise to a Neo-Classicism resolutely nostalgic in its Weltanschauung. ‘All beauty of art emanates out of the Antique,’ would declare Pier-Leone Ghezzi (1674–1755). His meticulous renderings of antique subjects from marble inscriptions to architectural ensembles, accompanied by his own invaluable commentaries, would herald an age of intense retrospection. Motivated every bit as much by a search for the sublime as for the underlying postulates of reason, painters, sculptors, architects, art historians and collectors descended upon Rome. The attraction of Rome, what’s more, had been enhanced by the recently excavated sites of Pompeii and Herculanum. Celebrating in over two thousand plates the desolate splendour of sites such as these, Giambattista Piranesi (1720–1778) would raise the mere fascination for antiquaria to an elevated aesthetic plain. In depicting broken staircases, sectioned columns, collapsed domes, all caught in the chiaroscuro of a late afternoon light, Piranesi was portraying – far more than the subjects at hand – the spiritual climate of a late crepuscular world. That light, in fact, would go on fading. And if, soon enough, it no longer struck the flanks of antique ruins but the boughs and branches of a nascent Romanticism, that Romanticism would have simply transferred the decor of retrospection from the architectonic to the pastoral.

Backwards, we gaze backwards in precipitating forwards. Or, rather, in being precipitated forwards. For certainly the accelerations generated by the Industrial Revolution from the nineteenth century onward would create an ever growing hiatus between our material conditions and those – ultimately far more determinant – in which our deepest psychic imperatives once found palpable expression. Looking backwards, we could only be searching for ourselves. Straying through the ruins and debris of past civilisations, we could only be hoping for glimpses – no matter how tenuous – of our long forgotten identities.

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Freud himself called it ‘eine Phantasie.’ In sending Sándor Ferenczi the twelfth and last chapter of his Metapsychologie on 28 July 1915, one of the seven chapters he himself would destroy soon after, he forewarned his disciple: ‘I can only hope that the reader…will be indulgent even if, for once, critical spirit gives way, here, to fantasy.’¹ In an attempt to trace the origins – the aetiology – of neuroses, Freud, fully aware of the hypothetical nature of his exposé, reached far beyond the Greco-Latin mythologies to which he was deeply attached to the Palaeolithic itself. ‘Under the effect of deprivations provoked by the advent of the Ice Age,’ he boldly proposed, ‘humanity became collectively anxious.’ It is during this very period, he continued, that, due to the scarcity of basic sustenance, birth control came into practise. This, in turn, gave rise to sexual repression for the first time in human history. What Freud called a ‘constitutional disposition’ had been established. It would serve as the source of each and every ensuing neurosis.

Even if we can readily dismiss such a hazardous supposition (Freud himself certainly did), this Phantasie, nonetheless, laid the ground for an entirely fresh interpretation of the human psyche. Inspired, no doubt, by the work of Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), the German biologist and philosopher, Freud would apply ‘Haeckel’s law’ to the human psyche, correlating ontogenesis (the development of an individual organism) with phylogenesis (the development of a genetically related group of organisms). The evolution of the individual, that is, could now be considered as a recapitulation of that of all humanity. Seen in this light, each of us, in our psychic development, passes through each and every stage – call it strata – of humankind at large. ‘Impressive analogies from biology have prepared us to find that the individual’s mental development repeats the course of human development in an abbreviated form,’ Freud had already written in his Leonardo da Vinci study in 1910.² The individual at birth, according to this insightful interpretation, is endowed with a ‘libidinal sediment’ – a set of instincts inherited from an aboriginal past – to which new and individual traits come to add themselves like so many layers in an archaeological cross-section.

We know, of course, of Freud’s profound fascination for archaeology, and the analogy he often drew between his own nascent discipline and that of archaeological excavation. Both, indeed, reach downward and, as they do, explore deeper and deeper levels of vestigial deposits. These deposits, be they those contained within an individual psyche or secreted within some richly anthropic subsoil, are charged with the history of their respective origins. Properly examined, analysed, classified, they contain the hidden history of those very origins. Here, Heracleitus’s fragment ‘the way up is the way down’ might well be read in paraphrase. For certainly, as we reach downward through those successive strata, those impacted layers of lost testimony, the darkness therein grows luminous. Becomes lit with the light of essential disclosure.

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Everything’s there. For anyone living in an archaeologically rich milieu or, alternatively, driven by curiosity to the texts themselves and what might be called ‘archival excavation,’ the evidence awaits us. The past, no matter how elusive, not only underlies the present, but – properly interpreted – comes to clarify it as well. Like the basso continuo of an ongoing accompaniment, its notes, often fragmentary, even illegible, lie in counterpoint to our own; establish the ground – the very grund – upon which our own successive substructures stand.

It would far exceed the limited ambitions of this essay to explore that ground, those successive substructures, in a thoroughgoing manner. One might, however, touch briefly upon certain critical moments in their composition. Basing our own interpretation on vestige alone, one might begin, indeed, with the eolith (eo for dawn, lith for stone). Yes, one might well begin with the ‘dawn stone,’ that chipped pebble dating from the Pleistocene (an estimated two million years ago). All but indistinguishable from an accident of nature, this earliest constituent artefact – the product of the first intentional artisanal gesture on the part of homo habilis – might be compared to the muscular twitching of an embryo in its uterus. Even the most trained typologist often has trouble differentiating, at this stage, matter from its materialisation; substance from its substantiation. This incipient handaxe scarcely shows any sign whatsoever of a separate development. It still belongs, it would seem, to the very magma out of which it has only begun to evolve.

A second chip here, a third chip there, and one reaches – a quarter of a million years later – the first discernible ‘pebble cultures.’ Here, at last, one can begin to distinguish with ever growing certitude the worked tool, duly articulated. Without falling into a Phantasie ourselves, couldn’t we postulate, at least, an analogy of our own: one in which we, too, over a vast expanse of geophysical time (measured more by glacial expansions and contractions than any chronological sequence) come to individuate, to distinguish if not separate ourselves from that surrounding magma, i.e. nature itself. We go on, chip after chip, flake after flake, fashioning our tools in an increasingly complex, increasingly distinct manner. Over a million years later (circa 500,000 BC), the elegant Acheulean biface – an oval-shaped handaxe pressure-flaked about its edges and often compared to a limanda due to its fish-like aspect – will make its appearance. Even this highly evolved tool, however, could only have been conceived as a discrete unit: as, that is, an artefact executed in a single, all-inclusive moment of non-evolving time. It precludes serialisation. One would have to await the so-called flake-tool cultures (and most especially the Levalloisian) during the third glaciation (circa 200,000 BC) to discover the very first implements prepared in a predetermined, premeditated fashion. These flake tools (skinning knives and skin-scrapers for the most part, far more appropriate to life in cold and wet climates than the handaxe) reflect an evolving attitude in regard to time on the part of their makers. Production strategies, a growing sense of the sequential, of cause and effect, have clearly come into play. One might postulate, now, based on the execution of such artefacts, an ever-growing awareness of temporality and all that such an awareness implies in terms of psychic development.

Reading prehistory on the basis of vestige alone, one cannot help but equate ‘evolution’ with ‘separation’; how our own gathering self-awareness as separable/separate entities in both temporal and spatial terms comes at the cost of an ever-increasing sense of rupture. In growing, we grow away. Each technological achievement generates a breach, a violation, a distance taken from the aboriginal matrix out of which all life, originally, emerged. Every instance of material progress elicits, ipso facto, a fresh instance of severance, ‘distanciation.’ Moving at a catatonically slow rate towards self-consciousness in the Hegelian sense of the word, we come, at last, to take measure of the immensities, now, that surround us.

In reaching the Aurignacian (circa 32,000 BC), we begin invoking those very immensities by means of graphic representations. Be they painted, carved in relief, or engraved upon exquisitely fashioned bone tools, these first semiotic gestures depict, almost exclusively, the animals that inhabit those surrounding immensities. They attempt to summon – graphically speaking – horse and bison, rhinoceros and reindeer, toward the proximate, the immediate; reintegrate the estranged within the innermost circles of the familiar. For a cleavage exists, now, between the ‘here’ and the ‘there,’ between what we’ve come to call culture and nature. Having acquired a separate status over the millennia, we feel an increasing need, now, to lure, draw, induce – by whatever means possible – what lies otherwise beyond our reach. The magical properties of graphic representation become the privileged vector, at this very time, of such an appeal. ‘Art,’ in its earliest, most quintessential form, emerges as an attempt to bridge the gap. ‘What characterises humankind,’ Georges Sauvet writes in regard to late Palaeolithic art, ‘is our ability to evoke absent objects; to re-present them visually.’³ Haven’t we, though, become the ‘absent objects’ ourselves? Haven’t we, in our irrepressible need to acquire such a separate status, ‘broken contract’ with our earliest – deepest – affinities?

The arrival of the Neolithic (circa 9000 BC in the Near East) would see a violent acceleration of this very process. In coming to control our own food supply as emergent farmers and stockbreeders, we’d take an even greater distance from those surrounding immensities. With the Neolithic, we’d begin to produce what had always been proffered; take what had always been given. Concurrently, the invention of ceramic would allow us to store such produce against the vicissitudes of the very milieu that had brought such produce to bear. The rupture between the ‘here’ and the ‘there,’ between culture and nature, had reached – by now – irreconcilable proportions. ‘Ineluctably, a sense of alienation would arise out of that instigating moment, that act of primal violation. On a mythological level, it would find expression (at a somewhat later date) in Prometheus’s theft of the thunderbolt from the gods overhead, and – in its Judeo-Christian counterpart – Adam’s theft of the forbidden apple from the garden. In each case, disgrace, humiliation, would be the price exacted, what humankind would have to pay for having ‘seized control’.⁴

Out of that all-critical moment in human evolution would emerge our first gods. ‘A vertical typology begins to develop at the heart of the human psyche,’ writes Jacques Cauvin, ‘in which an initial state of anguish finally dissipates, but only at the price of an intense mental effort in an ascensional direction. That effort is experienced as an appeal to a divine instance that is both beyond and above humankind itself.’⁵

In interpreting human history on the basis of artefact alone, we might site the emergence (in the Mediterranean, at least) of carved figurines: tutelary spirits, proto-divinities for the most part, they once accompanied the dead as psychopomps. From the Cycladic idol to the Provençal funerary stele, these Bronze Age sculptures (circa 2000 BC) emerge as liaison figures between the living and the dead, the here and hereafter, earth and its freshly projected complement: heaven. Bits and pieces of such carved work are still discovered today in areas richly charged with protohistoric artefact. An eye here; a nose there; an entire torso yet there again: the relics of that evolving idolatry (and, along with it, the first instances of human figuration) can be found scattered across the surface of the ground, confounded with the flint, ceramic, serpentine, of other cultures, other epochs.

As we’ve already suggested: everything’s there. In shattered fragments, disparate shards, vestiges emanating out of virtually every moment in human history rise to the surface, and – like some hermetic grammar – beg to be read. For read, duly interpreted, they might well tell us everything we need to know not only about human evolution but – far more immediate – that of our own individual development as well. Harping back to ‘Haeckel’s law,’ and conflating, as he did, phylogenesis with ontogenesis, we might find astonishing parallels, most especially in terms of those successive, seemingly inexorable, stages of human severance. Be they historico-collective, proper to the entire species, or specifically individual, they trace a singular itinerary. Yes, in growing, we’ve grown away. We’ve wrested free of the matrix, be it that of nature itself or its most archaic personification: the Mater Magna endowed – as mother figure – with the aura of a radiant psychic investment. Driven, no doubt, by a profound anguish that knows little if any limits, we’ve come to establish, in ever increasing increments, our separate identity. This has been attained, however, at a terrible cost. Severance has led, ineluctably, to isolation, and isolation – more often than not – to despair. The citadels of our selfhood envelop, we’ve come to discover, little more than a frenetic emptiness.

In looking back, now, in crossing those elected fields in which vestige abounds, inspecting this bit of Cardial ceramic or that bit of knapped Acheulean flint, in establishing as we go – through all that disparate artefact – a viable chronology, could we, indeed, be searching for anything but ourselves? For those suppressed levels of consciousness? For those lost worlds in which we once exulted in an intensely reciprocal, if not fusional, state with our very origins?

More than metaphor, vestige represents analogy. Rising hors contexte to the very surface or lying in successive layers immediately beneath us, it bears witness – palpably, materially – to those lost reciprocities. Becoming, as we have, the historians, the grammarians, the archivists, of that obfuscated past, we’re given – therein – a plethora of evidence. Underlying our own present-day existence, underwriting our every measured reflection, archaeological vestige serves to reminds us of everything we’ve forgotten. Even more, it preserves – within its own resonant depths – the dark chords of our own most fervent longings.

1. In 1983, Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, in preparing an edition of the Freud-Ferenczi correspondence, came upon this letter and the attached document tucked away amongst Ferenczi’s papers. My translation.
2. Leonardo da Vinci, trans. Alan Tyson (Penguin, 1963), 136.
3. Georges Sauvet, ‘Rhétorique de l’image préhistorique,’ in Psychanalyse et préhistoire, ed. A. Fine, R. Perron, F. Sacco (Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 84. My translation.
4. Gustaf Sobin, ‘Stelae: The Emergence of Human Figuration’ in Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc (University of California Press, 1999), 76.
5. Jacques Cauvet, Naissance des divinités, naissance de l’agriculture: la révolution des symboles au Néolithique (Editions du CRNS, 1994), 100. My translation.